George Andrews Awarded Honorary Professorship at Nankai University

George Andrews, Evan Pugh Professor of Mathematics at Penn State University, has been has been awarded an honorary professorship at Nankai University in China. Andrews receives this honor in recognition of his many important contributions to research fields including number theory and combinatorics. In addition, he is recognized for solving a number of well-known long-standing problems in these fields. Andrews has expressed that, as an honorary professor of Nankai University, he would do his best to support the teaching and research projects at the Nankai University's Center for Combinatorics — one of the leading national academic institutions for mathematical research.

Andrews, who has served as the president of the American Mathematical Society since 2009, studies number theory and the theory of partitions and their applications to statistical mechanics and computer science. He is an authority on the work of Srinivasa Ramanujan, an Indian mathematician of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, who is considered to be one of the greatest mathematical geniuses of all time. Andrews is collaborating on a multi-volume study of Ramanujan's lost notebook, which Andrews discovered in the Trinity College Library at Cambridge in 1976. The first volume of this study was published in June of 2005.

Andrews has received many other honors and awards throughout his career. He was appointed to the review-advisory panel of the Simons Foundation in 2010 and, in 2008, he was named as one of three finalists for Baylor University's Robert Foster Cherry Award for Great Teaching, the single largest award given to an individual for exceptional teaching. He received the Centennial Award from the Department of Mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania in 1999 "in recognition of contributions to pure mathematics and mathematical education." He was elected a Fellow of both the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics and the National Academy of Sciences in 2009 and 2003, respectively, and he became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1997. In addition, Andrews was awarded honorary degrees by the University of Waterloo in Canada in 2004, the University of Florida in 2002, and the University of Parma in Italy in 1998. Throughout his career, he has given numerous invited lectures in the United States and abroad.

A member of the Penn State faculty since 1964, Andrews was named Evan Pugh professor of mathematics in 1981. He served as chair of the department from 1980 to 1982 and from 1995 to 1997, and he is currently the department's associate chair for faculty development. During his career at Penn State, Andrews has served as thesis advisor for numerous doctoral-degree and master's-degree students.

Andrews earned a doctoral degree in mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania in 1964, and a bachelor's degree at Oregon State University in 1960.